Xbox 720 rumored to have its own Siri, unlock Kinect’s true potential

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As we approach Microsoft and Sony announcements for their next generation game consoles, the rumor mill is kicking into high gear. The latest rumor has the next Xbox, codenamed Durango, performing natural language recognition in a similar way to Apple’s Siri. While the Xbox 360 currently has some voice recognition through the Kinect, it’s limited in usefulness by how restrictive the actual voice controls are currently implemented.

After the rise of motion controls in the last generation, it’s clear that the consoles aren’t just going to compete on performance anymore. Both Nintendo and Sony have bet on touch screens to different extents, so moving the SmartGlass technology forward isn’t going to be enough of a distinguishing feature for the next generation Microsoft hardware. While the Xbox 360 is currently the king of consoles in the US, it’s not doing nearly as well in the rest of the world. It’s going to need a hook of some sort, and this voice functionality just might be a big part of what Microsoft has up its sleeves.

Microsoft has had some fairly good ideas with the Kinect up to this point, but the hardware has some serious technical constraints. Originally, the Kinect was supposed to have a better camera and standalone image processing, but that was tossed out for the final version. Sadly, this meant developers were hamstrung by the hardware limitations. It’s not just the voice controls that are stilted and wonky. Still, they’ve been able to ship 18 million units, so it’s an unqualified financial success as an add-on.

The Verge has sources claiming that the next Xbox will be able to perform speech-to-text, natural language recognition, and wake on voice tasks. If Durango ships paired with a next-gen Kinect that offers substantially better voice and motion detection, Microsoft could have something special here. There are roughly 75 million Xbox 360s in the wild, but only a small fraction of those have a Kinect paired with them. If every Durango console has a next-gen Kinect, developers will actually be incentivized to create games that take full advantage of those features instead of haphazardly slapping on Kinect functionality. Financially speaking, reaching an entire user base is much more compelling than reaching the fraction that went out to buy a peripheral device.

Information is still scarce, so we don’t know all of the implementation details quite yet. The consoles will undoubtedly be much more powerful than current phones and tablets, so it seems plausible that it could handle the speech recognition on the hardware itself instead of sending it to the cloud like Siri does. It’s not a forgone conclusion, though, and having everything pass through servers does have benefits. It allows for better analysis of how people use the service, and offers on-the-fly updating to the software. Even with an iPhone sitting next to a wireless router, Siri still sometimes chokes on very basic commands. With the current always-on DRM rumors, don’t be surprised if it needs a constant network connection in either scenario.

In the cloud or handled locally, better speech is a safe bet going forward from Microsoft. Let’s hope that this time around, Redmond knocks it out of the park. It’d be nice to see the Xbox team finally deliver on the full potential of the Kinect concept since they certainly didn’t do that with the current hardware.

Now remember there are other languages and accents too. What about them?
Voice recognition is usually designed for english only. Putting aside the issue of many developers being arrogant racists. “Everyone speaks english. I only know english and i have done fine”.

What about for example the german markets. They are fanatical when it comes to dubbing content. They do not seem to know english that well due to that. Voice recognition will not work.

This is the global unicode mess all over again and still the same messed narrow minded thinking. “Only english exists. Other countries? What do you mean?”

Voice recognition will be the new unicode mess. Also provided by americans i might add.

Americans enlightened? My ass!

If korea or japan controlled this market we would have selfdriving talking cars by now. That actually work.
Have you seen the phones they have there?
They are several years ahead of the rest of the planet.

America is slowing down progress, dragging the rest of us with them through companies with monopoly.

Phil

So how does your argument hold for the success of SIRI? Or the voice recognition on my droid that I find amusing and use every once in a while.

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/4FK5M7SMFZWSZPTWEXFAWSAZA4 Christopher W

Japan’s Playstation in this market doesn’t have the same capabilities so your argument is pretty weak.

Pixzule

Really? It sounds more like your hateful towards Americans then you are towards voice recognition. English is a very widely known language, most countries that have educational programs (and some countries that don’t have those programs do this as well) teach English as a second language, sometimes a core class, to the students. Now I’m not saying that English is the ONLY language, but it is in fact the more universally known. Voice recognition software has (almost always) multi-language functionality, yes not to the same degree as they will for English.

But that isn’t what your comment is about at all, your comment is more about America being “Evil”. If you wish to talk about that, then get off ExtremeTech, and go to another website that is anti-‘MERICA

Sincerely, an American that isn’t completely ignorant of other cultures and languages.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003976957614 Willy McBurgle

“ALL THIS CAN BE YOURS FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF $9.99 A MONTH!!!”……pass

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